It's hard to predict the future because we humans prefer to think in terms of familiar paradigms. Even the most brilliant of our species are subject to this flaw. Now, Microsoft faces its turn. The owner of the operating system that likely runs your personal computer, the company that achieved monopoly with Windows and ducked the Department of Justice's scythe to keep it, faces a midlife crisis as the world goes gaga over portable consumer devices. This is the story of what's happening to Microsoft in the handheld operating system markets -- and how it parallels the earlier, similar journeys of IBM Corporation and Digital Equipment Corporation. Can Microsoft achieve dominance on mobile devices?

This is an interesting claim. What aspect of the GPL could possibly be bad for your business in any way, compared to what proprietary rentware such as Sharepoint is guaranteed to cost you?

Sharepoint we can get support for, we cannot get adequate support for OpenSource alternatives.

There are plenty of Microsoft Certified Partners which we can find support contracts with ... so we have plenty of choice.

Also because we are a charity, Microsoft and Google give us a significant discount (90%+) on their software (and in google's case Hardware).

If you are not a software company yourself ... then your company's use of any GPL software is completely free and unencumbered. Run it as much as you want for as many users on as many machines as you like. Fill your boots.

Again, we must have a support contract. We cannot find anyone to support us.

We do not have the resources in house to support it.

For example we use Oracle, SQL Server 2005/2008, Windows Server 2003 R2 and IIS, our current Admins do not have any know say PostgresSQL (MySQL does not have any GIS capabilities), Apache and Linux.

Using LAPP stack will be most likely be more costly since we have to migrate our current software and skillset over. This cost is minute compared to the licensing costs from Microsoft.

If your company does write and distribute software as its core business ... then simply write your own software. Don't ship GPL code to your customers.

[sarcasm]Yes we can just write our own, because writing software is so simple.[/sarcasm]

You are going to have to explain what on earth you think it is about the GPL that could possibly be bad for your company. Without such an explanation, your claim makes absolutely no sense at all.

When I did work for a software house, MIT/BSD licenses were acceptable and any license where we didn't have to "give the code back".

This is because if we did make any modifications e.g. bug fixes, and deployed to a live site we are required by the GPL to give the code back. This is of course simply unacceptable, to our management thus no GPL software.

GPL isn't a one size fits all solution. I wish you would stop pretending it is.